Tom Peters: Re-imagine!This is not a book for wimps. I still haven't taken it all in. It's densely packed with jewels, nuggets and mind blowing material. Feels like reading an encyclopedia that you can't live without.

Seth talks to the Spokesman Review

September 24, 2005
at 09:27 AM

As I've discussed earlier, I was invited to participate in a citizen blogging exercise with the Spokesman-Review,
Spokane's only serious local paper. The Review is leading the way
nationally with it's interest in citizen blogging, but my current
biggest and deal-breaking gripe with The Review is that they foolishly
charge you to view their newspaper online. This baffles me for a host
of reasons. For one: it completely knocks out my demographic from their
readership. I'd wager that the coveted males 18-34 are in the low
single digit percent of their subscribers. Which is a real shame
actually. They seem to be trying to embrace my wider demographic with
the whole blogging thing, but yet they're so clueless with that
subscription thing. They almost get it, which is almost more frustrating than them completely not getting it. This recent post by uber market guru Seth Godin all but mentions them by name:

That local paper, the one that struggles to make its subscription
and newsstand guarantee every day, wants you to register before you can
read an article online. And they want to know a lot about you (your
gender, your date of birth) before they will allow you to pay attention
to your site.

The same company that runs ads hoping you’ll buy a newspaper that
costs more to print than it does to sell, puts up roadblocks to keep
you from reading online.

Wait.

“Pay attention” are the key words. The consumer is already paying.
You’re paying with a precious commodity called attention. Instead of
fending you off and holding you back, perhaps the newspaper ought to be
making it easier to give your precious attention to them…

A quick gut check will probably confirm what many of us truly
believe: the number of channels of communication is going to continue
to increase. And either you’ll have a channel or you won’t. Either
you’ll have access to the attention of the people you need to talk
with, (notice I didn’t say talk “at”) or you won’t.

So, the real question to ask isn’t, “how much will I get paid to
talk with these people?” The real question is, “how much will I PAY to
talk with these people?”

And here's the clincher, he's only talking about forcing readers to register, I think he'd go into cardiac arrest if he knew The Review also required readers to pay a fee to read. It's really just unforgivable.

I have to wonder: if the Review had to make a choice between having
me read for free online, or not having me read anything at all, would
they opt for the latter? Because they have.

Comments

And how. I simply will NOT pay (or even subscribe) to read news. There are simply too many outlets out there that can provide it without making me jump through hoops or give up money. And I spend a significant amount of time reading news on a daily basis.

Lame that they get it in terms of blogging/etc. But just aren't there yet. It's got to be a hard transition for them though. For a long time they WERE the source of information (TV doesn't count - it's just too incredibly banal when it comes to real news (local or otherwise) - and people payed for that clear channel that provided them with information. The internet has clearly changed that - completely. (In fact, look at the number of stories of late of people catching the NYTimes in bold-face lies - and blogging about it. If that doesn't represent a complete paradigm shift, I don't know what does.)